Showing posts by Frances Morgan

27|06|2012

Since 2008 Jan Jelinek has been releasing
recordings from the archives of an electronic ‘outsider’ musician,
Ursula Bogner. Born in 1949 and employed as a
pharmacist for Schering, she devoted her leisure time to exploring
electronic sound, constructing a home studio, attending workshops
and building up a body of tape and synthesiser pieces that
reverberate with a ghostly, eerie intimacy.

Except, of course, she probably didn’t – Bogner is widely
believed to be one of Jelinek’s various musical personae, despite
his carefully constructed story of a chance meeting with her son
followed by the donation of an archive of reel-to-reel recordings,
photos and writings. After the first Bogner release in 2008 – a
compilation of fragmentary works dated ‘1969-88’ – another, more
fully realised album, Sonne = Blackbox, followed in 2011.
This release took the tale further, coming with extensive
documentation of Bogner’s research into esoteric areas such as
space travel and Wilhelm Reich’s theories of ‘orgonomy’. More
recently, Jelinek has taken his discovery out live, with
performances in which he and Andrew Pekler interpret Bogner’s
compositions.

‘Andrew Pekler & Jan Jelinek play Ursula Bogner’ was on my
list of must-sees at Mutek festival in
Montreal a few weeks ago. Sonically, the Bogner releases, with
their gently unearthly analogue miniatures, ticked many of my
boxes, whoever the man or woman making the music was. I’d no
problem with being Jelinek’s target audience conceptually, either.
It seemed pretty clear that he intended to comment on the ongoing
fascination with unearthing marginal figures from electronic
music’s past, an archival itch that, four years after the first
Bogner release, seems no closer to being scratched. That he chose a
female musician was significant. Composers like Daphne Oram, Laurie
Spiegel, Eliane Radigue and Ruth White are not only outliers
because of their obscurity; their gender puts them even more
intriguingly on the margins (although, as more musicians/engineers
of all genders come to light, perhaps the well-meaning but slightly
fetishy edge to this strain of archive fever will die down a
little). The Reichian ideas about libidinal orgone energy that
Jelinek added to the mix could even be seen as a gentle dig at the
essentialist ideas of tactility, mysticism and sensuality that
often linger around descriptions of electronic music made by women.
Jelinek's take on sound and gender seemed sharp, funny and on
point, and if women’s roles in shaping electronic music are finally
coming into the light, what’s a little irony along the way? On the
flight over to Canada I'd been reading about science fiction writer
Alice Sheldon, whose stories published under the name James Tiptree Jr were praised for being “ineluctably
masculine”; electronic sound, like science fiction, offers a space
to play with identity, subvert stereotypes.

My misgivings start to take shape in the dark, hushed space of
the Monument-National theatre, where it is harder to ignore who is
turning the dials. On stage, Jelinek and Pekler manipulate tape
machines and oscillators. Their actions are projected on one half
of a screen above them, the rest of which plays out a slideshow of
Bogner ephemera: schematics and diagrams; linocuts of planets;
photographs of Bogner’s home-built orgone accumulator. And, of
course, photos of someone purporting to be the woman herself – at
home, at work, at play. High, delicate and disembodied voices echo
out from whimsically named ‘Sombrero Galaxies’ into the ornate
domed room, and Jelinek pitchshifts his own voice up to an
androgynous tone to narrate a text. The mixture of pure analogue
abstraction and the vocal-based ‘emotive register’ spoken of in the
sleevenotes to Sonne entices me to drift off into a fluid,
utopian post-gender future space, like the calm galaxies depicted
in Bogner’s planet prints; something it's easy to do when listening
to the records.

But in this three-dimensional setting, the physical facts keep
asserting themselves. At an electronic music festival whose
performers are for the most part male, the Ursula Bogner project
doesn’t feel so different from anything else on show. I find myself
asking, as a static image of Bogner hovers over the stage, whether
it's OK for male musicians to co-opt a history that isn't theirs.
Does Jelinek's ironic objectification of a woman who probably never
existed edge real women’s art even closer to the margins,
trivialise it for those of us who think rediscovering it is less a
subject for satire and more an urgent political project? Is the
endpoint of this playful exercise in gender-bending postmodernism
just a theatre full of people staring at a photo of a woman,
listening to music made by men? The sounds that come from this
configuration of Jelinek, Pekler and the hypothetical Ursula Bogner
are inviting, but their live presence alienates, leaves me thinking
that this collaboration is better left in the disembodied realm of
recording, where one isn't so easily reminded of the still-skewed
realities of who actually gets to make, perform and benefit from
music.